Shoot to Thrill (21 page)

“Hopefully we can pick up a camel somewhere.” He frowned as he ripped off a long strip of parachute for a bandage. “You’re not afraid of riding a camel, are you?” He handed it to her.

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know,” she said, and started wrapping Marc’s ribs with the silk. “I’ve never ridden one.”

“Work on the idea, okay?”

Sure, she would.

She stabilized the ribs as quickly as she could in the inadequate light of the moon and stars. It was like plastering a wall blindfolded and using plastic kids’ tools. She could tell Kick was impatient to get moving. He kept pacing back and forth.

“What should we do about his arm?” he asked, making her jump as she tied off the parachute strips.

“It needs a splint.” What it
really
needed was a surgeon, an X-ray machine, and a solid cast.

“Want me to help realign the broken bone?” She looked at him in surprise. “I’ve gone on a lot of missions,” he said by way of explanation. “People get hurt.”

She nodded gratefully. “Thanks.” It took a lot of strength to pull the ends of a bone apart and carefully maneuver them so the break went back together as it should. She’d never done it alone before. Without X-rays. Or anesthesia.

God help her.

“Don’t suppose either of you are packing a bottle of vodka?” she muttered, pulling an ACE bandage from the first aid kit.

Marc gave a manly snort. “
Cher
. I don’ need no stinkin’ vodka. Just give me a stick to bite down on.”

She shot him a dry smile. “I meant for me.”

He barked out a laugh, took her hand, and brought it to his lips. “I tell you what,
jolie fille
. You fix my arm, I buy you a whole case, we get back to civilization.”

Suddenly, he gave out a howling yelp and practically crushed her hand with his massive fingers.

With a gasp, she looked up to see Kick gingerly gripping Marc’s wrist, the other hand smoothing gently over his now straight arm. The ugly bump was gone.

“There. That ought to do it.”

Lafayette said something she was really glad she didn’t understand.

Kick winked at her. “That’ll teach him to flirt with my woman.”

She didn’t know what stunned her more, that he’d done a perfect job on the bone without her help, or that he’d called her his woman.

“You make sure the break’s set right,” he said. “I’ll get the ruined field pack. We can use the metal frame for a makeshift splint.”

“Okay,” she said, still too shaken to move. “Good.”

Lafayette groaned and suddenly his hand went limp in hers.

“Ah, hell,” Kick said. “He’s passed out.”

RAINIE
prayed Marc wasn’t going into shock. After coaxing him awake, she’d spread the extra clothes over him that Kick had pulled out of the packs, mounded sand under his feet to keep his circulation going, and held an ammonia capsule under his nose for good measure.

“Stay with us, soldier,” Kick ordered, which irritated Lafayette enough to cuss himself back to consciousness. Apparently he was a Navy man.

“
Merde, sa fait mal
,” Marc said, hissing out a breath between his teeth.

After Kick bent the metal frame to fit snug up against the arm, they were able to wrap it like a mummy with strips of parachute, stabilizing the break so it couldn’t move. Not perfect, but better than nothing.

In the meantime, Kick had brought out water and pouches of MREs, and they ate a hurried meal. Rainie doled out doses of aspirin and Tylenol.

“Ready?” Kick hefted the pack and helped Lafayette up. “Can you manage the duffel?” he asked her.

She nodded.

He paused, giving her a look she couldn’t quite decipher. For a second she thought maybe he was going to kiss her. But he didn’t. He just nodded back and started walking. “Good girl. We’re oscar mike.”

Going single file with Marc in the middle, they fell into a swift, steady pace.

Kick seemed to know where they were going. Rainie didn’t have a clue. The men had studied the maps and SAT photos as they ate, discussing the best route to take toward the Nile Valley. To her it was all just lines and squiggles. The only map she’d ever looked at was for the New York subway system, and she’d never actually had to use it to get anywhere. She didn’t ride the subway, either.

According to Kick, between where they were and the DFP camp lay a vast sea of shifting sand which they were forced to skirt around, adding another twenty or so miles to the trip. How would they ever be able to make it? They only had eight bottles of water between them, and three of them were half empty already. How many days would it take to walk seventy—no, ninety-five miles? That camel was looking better and better.

As soon as the sky began changing from black to indigo she started to look over her shoulder, checking behind them for any sign of their pursuers.

She spotted the telltale dust cloud an hour or so after sunrise.

“They’re coming,” she told Kick, her heartbeat taking off at a gallop.

“Keep an eye on them,” he said, glanced back briefly, then kept walking. “If we’re lucky, they won’t come this way for quite a while.”

How could he be so damn calm? “Shouldn’t we try to hide?” she protested.

“If they get close, yeah. Until then we keep moving.”

Panic starting to flutter in her chest. “But—”

“Rainie. Trust me.”

Easy for him to say.

She battled back the rush of fear that threatened. He was the expert. If he wasn’t worried, she shouldn’t be, either.

Deep breath. Let it out slowly.

I will be fine.

We will be safe.

There were only two Jeeps today, she realized. One roamed back and forth along the plateau where she and Kick had landed. The other plied the other side of the big wadi, as Kick called it, where he’d left his trail of footprints in the sand for them to follow. The diversion seemed to be working.

For now.

But it wasn’t her imagination that, after spotting them, Kick picked up the pace even more. She could barely keep up, and Marc was looking decidedly grim. Every hour or so she fed him another pain reliever, inadequate as they were, and Kick would make him drink nearly all of his water ration.

“He needs to rest,” she quietly said to Kick during one of their breaks. “Longer than five minutes.”

“Have you checked the bad guys lately?” he asked somberly.

“No, I—” She’d been too busy checking on Marc. She searched the horizon.

Except the dust trails were no longer on the horizon. The two trails had come together into one. A lot closer.

And they were heading straight for them.

TWELVE

THE
blazing African sun was getting higher in the sky, nearly directly overhead by now. Heat poured down like an oven broiler. Kick felt like a chicken being slowly roasted alive. At times from the inside out.

But if he felt bad, Lafayette must really be hurting. Kick couldn’t imagine having to hike nearly a hundred miles in that condition. He remembered like it was yesterday the horrific pain in his leg and shoulder from the Russian land mine in A-stan. But he hadn’t had to walk. He’d radioed for help and a helicopter had been there within minutes.

He shook off the infuriating memory and wiped his face and neck with his T-shirt, long ago soaked through. Dry desert air usually felt ten degrees cooler than it really was, but ten degrees cooler than one twenty was still a hundred and ten fucking degrees. Well, at least it distracted him a bit from the cravings. Jesus, when would they stop? Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that.

Focus. Don’t think about it.

Behind them, the tangos were making steady sweeps of the landscape. Looked like the two Jeeps were working a loose grid pattern. They’d had a scare a few hours ago, thinking they’d been spotted, but the Jeeps had just been heading in their direction to reach a shady outcropping and take a short break—probably time for prayers.

So far the tangos hadn’t picked up their scent; but careful as Kick had been to stick to the hard-packed and rock surfaces as he’d led the trio across the moonscape, there’d been plenty of patches of barren sand to cross. A good tracker would have little trouble picking up their trail. Luckily, he seriously doubted there were any nomads in this crew of ass clowns. The fact that they drove Jeeps said these boys had money, which meant they were either part of a terrorist cell with Saudi oil connections, like abu Bakr’s al Sayika, or
janjawid
—government-funded vigilantes who were no better than domestic terrorists. Worse, in some ways—because they terrorized their own countrymen . . . and women. No self-respecting nomad would have anything to do with either group. The Bedouin were far too fiercely independent to kowtow to Khartoum, and too honorable to fall for the fundamentalist doctrine of blind hate spouted by
jihadi
terrorists. Every spec operator knew a Bedouin’s word was sacred; once gained, you could—and many had—trust your life to it with every confidence of coming out the other end alive. Which was why they were almost always victims of the
janjawid
, rather than allies.

“Kick,” Rainie said, bringing him out of his unpleasant thoughts.

“Yup.”

“The Jeeps. They’re getting closer.”

He slowed his grueling pace long enough to look back again. She was right. Either he was losing track of time, or the dust clouds were now advancing a lot quicker. Any minute now, the vehicles would break through the thin sliver of horizon that still hid them from view. Had the enemy found their tracks?

Suddenly Rainie gave a small cry. He whirled to see what was wrong.

She pointed breathlessly to a small cluster of dunes that lay to the northeast. “Is that what I think it is?”

He and Lafayette both looked.

Behind the far, distant dunes was a brilliant blue body of water, rippling and shimmering in the sunlight like a day at the beach.

Kick gave a tired grin. “Depends on what you think it is. What it’s
not
is a lake.”

Her lips parted. “Wow. A mirage? Seriously?”

“Just like in the cartoons.”

Lafayette chuckled. Kick was amazed the man still had it in him. Every time Kick felt like puking from the stomach cramps, he just looked at his traveling companion. The swarthy Cajun’s outdoor tan had turned positively grey, with white lines of pain bracketing his mouth and eyes.

Kick lifted Lafayette’s water bottle to his lips while Rainie stared in amazement at the mirage. “Drink up, man.”

“
Non
, I’m good.”

He was about to argue when she interrupted uncertainly, “So, in a mirage . . . are there usually real palm trees around the unreal lake?”

“What?” He jerked his gaze back. Sure enough, he could just make out the waving fronds of a clump of palm trees peeking out from behind one of the low dunes at the edge of the blue illusion. Well, hell. Where there were date palms, there was real water. And where there was water—

“Damn,” he exclaimed low. “That’s a goddamn village.”

“Isn’t on the map,” Lafayette said, his voice scratchy and his breathing rattly. “Maybe it’s a seasonal oasis.”

Rainie came up behind them. “A village is good, isn’t it? They’ll help us, won’t they?”

She sounded so optimistic, Kick hated to dash her hopes. “Depends,” he said.

Her face fell. “On what?”

He didn’t want to scare her more than she already was, so he let the question hang as he struggled for a good answer.

Lafayette helped him out. “Lotta different tribes and such in the Sudan. Most are good, ordinary people. But like everywhere, there some
bien mauvais drigaille
—very bad apples. Problem is, the bads up here have guns. Bads with guns are bads with power. Power they use to turn good people into more bads.”

As she digested that rather subtle way of saying they could easily be murdered or betrayed by the good, ordinary people in the village beyond the dunes, she shifted the duffel she was carrying to her other shoulder. The duffel holding the sniper rifle that gave
him
the power of life and death, too. A power he was planning to use in just a few days.

Was there a difference between him and the villagers, or even the bads? Was he
bien mauvais drigaille
, too, because of what he did? Even if it was in a good cause?

He guessed he’d have to find out on judgment day, because God only knew.

“But surely, if they see that one of us is hurt and needs help . . .”

She was also carrying Kick’s SIG. He’d fashioned her a shoulder harness out of his ankle holster and some strips of parachute fabric so it sat snug against her rib cage. Ready in case she needed it. She’d tried to tell him she didn’t want it. That she hated guns. Abhorred violence. But he’d given her such a quelling look she hadn’t dared argue.

He gave her the same look now. “The tangos are heading in this direction. It might not be because of us.”

The poison of reality finally flowed into her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “You mean . . . they could live here?”

“I hope not. I’d like to trade for some water and that camel I mentioned. But we need to find cover until we know exactly what’s going down here.”

Lafayette nodded. “Sounds good.” He swallowed slowly, like his throat was parched dry. “I could use a rest, me.”

“Find cover where?” she asked, glancing around. The landscape was a flat, undulating plain that bled into a sea of yellow dunes on one side and a line of rocky, purple hills on the other.

Kick looked back to gauge the dust cloud’s progress, locked his jaw, then turned and jerked his chin at the dunes at the edge of the palm grove. “If we walk double time, we can make it before they get here.” He looked at Lafayette with concern. “You up for it, buddy?”

Lafayette gave him a half smile that was hard as steel. “
Allonsez
,” he said. “I can rest when I’m dead.”

And Kick hoped like hell the words weren’t prophetic.

SHE
was touching him.

Merciful Jesus, thank you Lord God Almighty, she was finally touching him. The redhead. His Angel with an
H
.
Oh, yeah.
Her hand was on his thigh. His groin. Her fingers probed.